On the island of Ie Shima, on April 18, 1945, war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed in action and that is why that date has been selected by the National Society of Newspaper Columnist to be designated as National Columnists' Day.

After a few years of writing about Ernie Pyle for National Columnists' Day, it grew a bit challenging, and so the focus for our annual column for that occasion was expanded to include homage to other famous columnists from the past such as Herb Caen and Walter Winchell.

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For a columnist named Bob Patterson, who was born and raised in ScrantonPa. and now lives in Berkeley CA, to celebrate National Columnists' Day by writing this year's installment about a columnist, scalawag, and rascal named Bob Patterson, who was raised about a hundred years ago in Berkeley CA, is a daunting challenge. In order to produce a column that doesn't sound like a noteworthy example of shameless uber-egotism and crass self-promotion, we will refer to the writer from the past by his pen name of Freddie Francisco and note that the facts for this column were contained in the "expose'" story Freddie Francisco wrote about himself for a weekly newspaper named "The City of San Francisco" in their August 10, 1975 issue.

Francisco revealed that during the Twenties Patterson landed a $47 a week reporter's job on the New York Graphic and when he began to work the police beat Freddie/Bob was offered a $100 a week bonus from a Prohibition entrepreneur who wanted a phone call tip whenever the Prohibition agents left on a raid. That stunt got him fired. His confession relates that subsequently Freddie/Bob went to work for the fellow who had supplied the tip bonuses.

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In the early Thirties, Freddie/Bob moved to Japan. To augment his pay while living there Freddie wrote about the forbidden topic of Tokyo's notorious Yoshitwara district. That got him another pink slip and deportation status on the same day that he contracted malaria.

Freddie quickly transitioned to the staff of the China Press in Shanghai.

Freddy/Bob arrived in Shanghai between World Wars. Freddie described his reactions thus: "It was fine, fine, fine; Patterson decided to stay forever, and maybe three days over." It took only two months for him to get the assignment of writing a daily column he dubbed "The Dawn Patrol."

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During Freddie's stint in Shanghai, he gathered enough human interest stories to fill a thousand novels, if he ever retired from journalism.

BP graduated from college in the mid sixties (at the bottom of the class?) He told his draft board that Vietnam could be won without his participation. He is still appologizing for that mistake. He received his fist photo lesson from a future (more...)